Professor Rick Casten
Yale University
Atomic nuclei exist in the femtoscale, trillions of times smaller than the atomic scale, consist of up to hundreds of protons and neutrons doing 1021 orbits per second, and interact with both the strong and electromagnetic forces. Despite the chaos one might expect from such a system, nuclei display remarkable regularities and simple features. We will discuss how one can study such complex, many-body quantal systems experimentally and what features they exhibit. We will discuss how we can understand the structure of atomic nuclei, and how that structure depends on the number of nucleons they contain, with very simple and intuitive models. Finally, a new era is opening up in nuclear physics, comparable to the revolution in atomic physics engendered by the advent of the laser. We will discuss the technological underpinnings of this and how new experiments are radically modifying our half-century old understanding of these sub-atomic objects that comprise over 99% of the observed mass in the universe.